Steel Nibs Are Sprouting

New Dalit Writing From South India

Not only an important social document, this is a collection of highly readable, earthy literature that holds up a mirror of India to us. The second of two volumes that document the upsurge of dalit writing in South India that began in the mid-1970s brings together in English translation forty-three writers, activists and public intellectuals from Kannada and Telugu. Their poetry, fiction, essays, critical commentary, self writing and research into mythopoeic pasts have changed the very idea of modern literature, culture and society. Each writer strikes a distinct political note that challenges received wisdom. Initially published in small, alternative journals and daily newspapers, this fulsome, ground-hugging archive is a rare intellectual biography of the past half century; record of the meanings of Ambedkar, Lohia and Marx in contemporary India; and a mine of knowledge and insight into childhood, education, family, welfare, employment, work, the role of politics in dalit worlds.The array of dalit perspectives within these pages, sometimes in conversation, at other times clashing, provide texture and dynamism to what is possibly the most vital debate in the country today. Together, they tell the hidden story of India.

Susie Tharu is professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, EFL-U, and a founder member of Anveshi, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad. Co-editor of the two-volume anthology, Women Writing in India, and author of several influential papers, she has been active in the Indian women’s movement, is a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. She is co-editor of dossier I, No Alphabet in Sight (2011).